Nick Garner's Blog

I was asked a question about affiliate marketing recently and since i haven’t written much here recently, I figured I could re use my response…

Its a huge area and of course very competitive, but in my experience if its a subject you understand well and you can really add value to the user, then you will find it easier to get links and so rank

One of the sites I work on http://betting.betfair.com has adopted this approach and has done really well as an?? ‘affiliate’?? and its performs a place where there is a lot of ???? – so its extremely competitive.

The other interesting disconnect is between sites that get tons of traffic and those that commercialize the traffic.

for traffic, typically you get a fan of a subject who starts a blog and it goes from there – or you get a company how produces content for puts out a website and because they know how to write, it gets traction a good example of this would be www.anorak.co.uk

Affiliates though typically don’t know how to write and end up just playing the SEO game, which is fine, but not really sustainable since users are more sophisticated now than of old and see these sites for what they are : crap.?? An example of this is casinochoice.co.uk (do you really believe them?)

And of course search engines look at this kind of site as
a. not good for the user
b. taking money they could have in PPC

In respect to reading material… For SEO, I’ve always talked about Aaron Walls SEO book and of course SEOMoz

But the real trick with affiliate is to align your knowledge of a subject with something where there is plenty of money i.e. gambling – and be useful to the user and go hard on seo.

In respect to doing legwork on affiliate, its worth going though a few networks to get a feel for what right for you

http://www.reviewcentre.com/products129.html

And interestingly when you look at the numbers, revenue to you is typically 5% of user spend – except for gambling and money, but of course money is rather out of favor right now…

So in conclusion: affiliate is tough, but easy if you add value and help users to make a decision that is ultimately positive for them i.e. the best gambling company, the best TV and so on. If I were to show you the the best affiliate of all (in my opinion) – it would be www.moneysavingexpert.com and in gambling I think my (employers) site is good www.betting.betfair.com – study and learn!

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1. Wisdom of crowds, memes and affilaite marketing
2. Affiliate Black Hat vs White Hat
3. 13 prophecies for internet marketing